'Four more years' for McKesson

The Department of Health is negotiating four year support deals for the 21 NHS hospital trusts running McKesson patient administration systems.

The current support deal, signed in 2006, is set to expire at the end of March. The DH had been planning to sign a further two-year extension, but is now negotiating for a four year deal, which would extend to 2014.

McKesson is also understood to be on the brink of taking the investment decision to anglicise its Paragon hospital information system for the NHS market.

The DH Informatics Directorate declined to comment, saying negotiations were ongoing. McKesson also declined to comment. Sources indicate the final deal is likely to “go to the wire” and is not expected to be completed until March.

The shift to a four year contract extension appears to suggest a lack of confidence in the ability of CSC, the local service provider for the North Midlands and East of England, to deliver replacement hospital systems before 2012.

The mounting delays in the delivery of Lorenzo by CSC have required repeated extensions to be added to the national support deal between NHS Connecting for Health and McKesson.

The National Programme for IT in the NHS originally planned to replace all McKesson sites with its chosen CRS products by 2008.

In 2006, CfH signed a deal with McKesson to extend support for the then-23 NHS trusts using TotalCare and Star to 2010, the new point by which NPfIT was to have been completed.

Since then, the NHS McKesson TotalCare and Star sites have in effect been left in limbo, with their ageing HISs supported but no longer being developed, and no line of product replacement on offer.

McKesson still has the second largest installed hospital base in the NHS. The company has blown hot and then cold about the possibility of bringing a new hospital information system to the UK market.

In a March 2009, McKesson’s then UK MD, Charmaine McDonald, told E-Health Insider the company was looking at adapting Paragon, marketed in the US as community hospital system, to the NHS hospital market.

EHI now understands that, after lengthy deliberation, McKesson has decided that it will re-enter the NHS hospital systems market.

Link: McKesson UK